My latest desktop has Thunderbolt 4. While I'm glad I have it, as it's a mITX system, I really only use it to connect to a docking station. It's also great for

My latest desktop has Thunderbolt 4. While I'm glad I have it, as it's a mITX system, I really only use it to connect to a docking station. It's also great for monitors or 10Gbit ethernet if needed. The external SSD that I use is limited to 1GB/sec, and I rarely hit that with my use case, closer to 500MB/sec. To take advantage of 5GB/sec the external drive would have to be pretty well-built (expensive). My drive is the Samsung T7 Shield 2TB, which is the best price/performance for sustained performance that I could find on the market today. I do think external IO should try to keep pace with internal IO speeds, but it comes at a significant cost on the peripheral side of things. You also run into cable length issues. There's a reason why internal IO gets to faster speeds so much sooner, path traces don't have to deal with real-world external cable lengths. The link alludes to this, but I'd love to know how long of a cable you can use with 15GBps external devices considering the length on my passive Thunderbolt 3 dock cable is 2.3ft. USB 4.0 "v2" at 120Gbps will support a 2inch passive cable.